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What are the best enterprise ESPs? (Our list size is 600K)

Blake Stepan
posted 2016-10-18 16:21:18

We are currently using Maropost and honestly, I'm not very font of it. Our contract is up at the end of the month and I was curious what other people in the industry are using to send Broadcast emails to large lists.

The main heavy hitters right now are Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Pardot/Marketing Cloud, and IBM's Silverpop. They usually have the most features and best support.
Pricing can vary, note how many contacts you have, or how many emails you plan to send a year.
I worked in Marketo with a db of 1.2m, and it was fine, but got pricey. It helps to prune when you can.

There are a wide variety of ESPs that can cater to the size of email list you have. For me, it all depends on the customer support that they offer. I like knowing that a company is willing to help me sort things out if there are any technical difficulties whatsoever. I think with bigger lists, you will need to send an email.

Hi Blake, we (Stack Overflow) just switched to SendGrid after years of sending email from our own code-base. We've only been using it for a few weeks and are about to do our first big send. So far, so good. We also looked at Mailgun and Send With Us, but SendGrid was the best price for our needs of sending mostly transactional email with the occasional announcement.

I can understand the popularity of sendgrind among the programmer types because of its easy API access, but most marketers I've come across wouldn't be able to use that. I see that they market it as one platform, so have you used their email marketing service side of it? Or is it all really commingled together?

Blake, we've been using Silverpop (Now IBM) for years. I can't speak to how others compare, but IBM's Marketing Cloud definitely has some power to it. I'd be interested to know if anybody has experience using IBM (Silverpop) compared to other ESPs.

I HEART Silverpop!! I'm currently using Eloqua but used Silverpop at my previous job. Eloqua's customer support is horrible compared to Silverpop. Also I feel like Silverpop has all the tools and integration that Eloqua offers but is WAAAAAY easier to use. Integration is the key to what you need from your ESP. We bidirectionally communicate from Eloqua to Salesforce.

I've just now been watching through some videos, and this might be a bit dated, but the decision points and they way you can configure them are pretty sweet.
And now I just watched this one. Looks awesome!
I'm working pretty extensively with Eloqua too now, and while I haven't found it difficult, I'm just not crazy about the UI. Marketo probably had the nicest UI and allowed me to get things done quickest, it was easier to find things, see what interacted with what, and the activity logs on the contacts were super helpful and detailed. That helped debug a lot of issues. The activity log in Eloqua isn't so verbose and as easy to pull up.
How does silverpop handle that?

IBM/Silverpop has a pretty robust analytics section that's only getting better. Although they do announce things pretty far in advance of them rolling out so they can get beta groups together (gift and a curse if you're on those). I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'activity logs on the contacts'.

Like Carrie said underneath, more of the granular marketing activity attributed to each contact record, say when they were delivered an email, opened it, visited a page, had some data change on their record, were added to a list/segement, unsubscribed, etc.

If my memory serves me correctly, you can drill down the individual (unique identifier) and dissect the marketing activity. Especially if you're exporting the raw data into an API call into another application (we used Pentaho).

We combined the data from our CRM and Silverpop, essentially you could add any additional application you have that allow raw data API exports, into one data crunching "machine" and used that for all types of reporting, lead scoring, and even some predictive modeling. It was super cool.

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